The ascender and descender are a bit too long, and it could also be BP's new logo, but for me, the real problem is that it evokes the past in an unfortunate way. It looks like the cooling vent greebling on yesteryear's consumer electronics. You know, the bars and troughs that get filled with dust, and require Q-tips to clean (or, in a pinch, a rolled-up wad of paper chewed to a point). You can find them on many computers, but not so many in this decade; the Atari 2600 video console, released in the 1970s, is as good an example as any.

Better than what Gap did, and HP could sell me on the “we’re stripping away the unessential bits” theme, but they went to far. It does little to dissuade me from my idea that HP has become a cargo cult for other companies technology, senselessly making copies since they went into the PC market years and years ago.

Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, I hafta say that logo looks pretty badass chiselled into a slab of diode-equipped brass on my wrist. Could also look good on a aluminum ultrabook chassy or similar.

According to the Lip Watches website @boingboing-3bee85ac5d60c54d2a92f67e0814422f:disqus linked to (in the “history” section) that logo has been around since at least the early 50’s. I’d say it was probably a clear and direct influence on the MIT Press logo, dating from the early 60’s. Interesting!

Anybody know what this is in Sign Language? Imagine the signer facing you. The left is the extended thumb and the longer is the middle finger, the pinky finger hidden, not apart of the message, kind of like an upside down “Go F*** Yourself”.

You know, this is an article with the original logo directly beside it, with “hp” everywhere. And it took me a long time, with “hp” already in my head, just to see the h and p in that logo. ;) Practically NO ONE is going to understand what this logo is supposed to be for on it’s own.

It’s a strange, quite strange logo. I mean, it’s out of the ordinary for a company like HP. Actually, I’m very interested in seeing this new logo in motion. Maybe the middle is its waist and it could carry a semi-trasparent belt, or maybe it could start as a single oblique line and then expand to reveal its true identity. It could lose gravity and fall to the bottom, piece by piece, or every piece float like a balloon and find its place in the center. Maybe it could change color, a different color for every line, or drip color from its bottom: it’s four lines so they could use a variation of the logo to represent their printers (cyan-magenta-yellow-black). Ok, I’m getting dizzy now, but you get the point!

Because of the q-tip suggestion, I first saw it as a nose, in profile, with the two small lines delineating the sides of the (large) nostril, and the lower long line representing a q-tip (or finger) that has been inserted into the nostril.